Read Premiere's interview with Zooey Deschanel.

PREMIERE'S REVIEW (posted 6/13/08)

Directors who make trouble from inside the studio system, using the box-office clout they've amassed not as a prelude to directing assembly-line fanboy dreck but as an excuse to continue making personal projects they've written themselves, are a rare species worthy of protection and M. Night Shyamalan certainly falls into that category. That said, the moguls Shyamalan has irritated over the years with his inflexibility (not to mention his Jesus H. Hitchcock routine) may be popping champagne corks tonight, because by Monday he will be much more dependent on their opinions.

The Happening is a disaster, representing a number of negative firsts for Shyamalan. It's his first film in which the lead characters are less well-formed than those of an average TV movie. It's his first film in which the technical execution feels tossed-off and low-budget. It's his first film without a single beautiful image or moment that feels born of a natural filmmaker. It's his first film in which he is completely defeated by a phenomenally silly premise. It's his first film in which he seems to not even be trying.

The irritatingly generic title refers to the release of an airborne toxin that turns those exposed into suicide-zombies, with a blonde in the opening scene going glassy-eyed as she sits on a bench in Central Park and then methodically removing a hairpin from her head and stabbing herself in the neck. Then a cop blows his own head off with his sidearm; the dropped gun is picked up other victims, who kill themselves one by one. Later, one guy walks into the lion's cage at the zoo. The source of this mass outbreak of self-murder is easy enough to ascertain — you're looking at two or three guesses, tops — but the sturdiness of the twist is the least of Shyamalan's problems this time. Signs, the director's infinitely superior film about another "happening," was also very thin in its set-up and equally unable to find a satisfying resolution, but along the way there was meat on the bone. There was razor-sharp filmmaking craft on display — skillful framing, portentous quiet, cutting dialogue, suspense and shocks, subtle misdirection — all of which couldn't be more glaringly absent from The Happening, which feels no more labored over than the average Sci-Fi Channel original movie.

Mark Wahlberg stars as Elliot Moore, a soft-spoken Philadelphia high-school biology teacher who enunciates the word "whom" and obsesses over the plight of honey bee populations to the rolled eyes of his students. (Wahlberg seems at times to be cribbing from his role in Fear, where his street tough character had to occasionally pretend to be a civilized weenie.) Like most Shyamalan men, Elliot is quietly on the outs with his wife, played here by doe-eyed Zooey Deschanel, and when the suicide outbreak becomes headline news, they decide that being in a major urban center is a foolish idea and head for the hills. Cue the film's first near-fatal mistake: the tagging along of John Leguizamo as a teacher colleague of Elliot's and his near-mute daughter. It's rarely noted, but blindingly obvious, that Leguizamo has almost zero acting ability, making him a terrible choice in almost any role. Aside from that, though, the dual purposes of these two characters could not be more apparent if they wore T-shirts announcing how they fit into the story.

The longer it goes on, the sillier it gets. Stranded in Nowhere, Pennsylvania, after their train conductor throws them off — he claims he can no longer raise a dispatch on the radio — Elliot and his posse encounter various kinds of backwoods types, including a mountain man oddball who makes non-sequiturs about hotdogs and turns out to have exactly the right theory as to what's going on, people who communicate only by thrusting a shotgun through the slats in their windows, and a mysterious old woman (played by Betty Buckley) whose ridiculous personality changes from moment to moment, scene to scene. None of these encounters have the slightest dramatic resonance, and the only genuine dread in the film seems to emanate from the director as he gets closer and closer to having to provide a resolution for this mess. By the time characters are having heart-to-heart talks with houseplants and utilizing the Underground Railroad — no, seriously — the audience will be so completely scrubbed of their goodwill that they may be filing for the exits, something that would have been unthinkable five years ago, when a Shyamalan film was truly a happening.

— Ryan Stewart